Evaluation Question 1.

In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

(Pictures go left to right)

The Title of the film:
 For our title we decided to use the stop-motion technique as we found when looking at other films that this was a modern way of presenting a title, for example the film Napoleon Dynamite. We used primary colours when colouring in the title to associate it back to primary school and being a child.

The Setting:
For our setting we decided to use our main school building as this seemed a good building to associate an office with as its quite high-rised.. We also filmed most of our piece outside in our playing fields for the playground scene, we got this idea from Forrest Gump as their title sequence also starts outside with Forrest sitting on a bench.

The Costumes:
The costumes we chose were chosen for a specific reason in order for our characters to be represented more easily, for example having the secretary wearing a stereotypical suit and heels, having her hair in a bun and wearing glasses at the end of her nose. Watching films nowadays most costumes that characters wear are to represent their role or type of character and so we also followed this principal.

Camera Work and Editing:
When deciding what shots to incorporate into our opening titles we knew we had to encourage complex shots in order to keep it interesting and using shots such as shot, reverse shot and an establishing shot did this. When watching professional opening titles now they have to grab their audience straight away and lots of different types of shots are used to do this and so we had to make sure we stuck to this idea also.

Font/Style:
A variation of font styles are now used to present titles in films and some even fit into the style of the film, for example a horror film some titles are shown in blood. With ours we made them clear enough and not too distracting so the audience could focus more on the narrative.

Story/Narrative:
Like most opening titles we made sure we introduced the main characters and their background story straight away by the playground scenes as well as giving an idea to the audience about what the whole narrative was about. Opening titles such as 'Angel Share' introduces all the characters straight away at the beginning and we took influence from this film when thinking about introducing Gordon Twiginam except we added a voice-over.

Genre:
With our genre being Drama Comedy we made sure we had the generic conventions of a geeky character who always made mistakes (i.e the screenshot of him dropping all his papers) to provide the comedy part to the film and then we had the dramatic narrative of him going back to his school reunion having hated school when he was younger but how he's changed.This narrative is something the audience could relate to as it's quite realistic. Our real media product influence was the film 'You Again' from 2010 with the character Gordon Twiginam based on Marni.

Characters:
Our main character Gordon Twiginam is consistent throughout apart from the change of age at the beginning of the opening titles.Throughout the course of the film you would meet the people from his high school and also more of the secretary character would appear. As I said before Gordon Twiginam was based on the character Marni in 'You Again' and the secretary was taken from films such as 'Devil wears Prada' a secretary always trying to pleae.

Special FX:
Our special effects included a fade to black effect to show the time seperation between Gordon Twiginam being young and old. This was to break the film up so the audience could clearly see the division in time. A cross dissolve was also used in the playground scene to show the time change, and as I said previously we used the stop motion effect, although it does not however smoothly run together. With most drama comedy films special effects aren't a main feature as it's more about the storyline compared to action films such as James Bond with special effects appearing every other minute, we tried to stick to the actual genre and so didn't incorporate as many effects because of this.